This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Jack Taylor, the closest thing to a private eye in all of Galway, sums up the present state of his health: “a sodden drunk with mutilated fingers, a hearing aid, a limp, and an on/off affair with prescription drugs.” Not that his miserable condition slows Jack to a standstill. Throughout the latest book in the dark and often hilarious Taylor series, Jack keeps bugging Ireland’s mountain-climbing team to sign him up for its next Everest expedition. He’s not kidding.

Meanwhile, in his less delusional moments, Jack is hired to hunt down an 800 A.D. tome called The Red Book, which is infamous as the first true work of heresy. What follows is the sort of chaos endemic to all Taylor adventures: free-form episodes buoyant in insult, inspired profanity and colourful confusion.

Lightning Men

Article Continued Below

By Thomas Mullen37Ink, 384 pages, $32.99

The second novel in Thomas Mullen’s superbly researched historical series returns us to Atlanta in the early 1950s where the police force is taking a reluctant step into integration. As in the first book, a vaguely liberal white cop works an intriguing murder case and a Black cop does the same on a similarly tricky case in the Black community.

But as the two proceed with their crime-solving, the book draws us into the struggle for something even remotely close to racial equality in the city generally and on the police force particularly. Mullen reveals the terrible specifics of horrendous physical and psychological abuse routinely suffered by Black people.

The Ku Klux Klan gets especially fascinating treatment from Mullen. If they weren’t such a vicious lot, they’d be a laughing stock with all their apparatus — the pointy hoods, the crazy nouns with every “c” turned to “k,” the goofy passwords — that any ten-year-old would reject as infantile.

The Second Sister

By Claire KendalHarperCollins, 496 pages, $22.99

This is a thriller with intelligence and a high creep factor, a genre that’s difficult to get just right. The English writer Claire Kendal’s version comes close to perfection.

It features Ella Brooke as the narrator and sleuth. Ella is thirty and runs a support group for the families of the victims of crime in the city of Bath. Ella’s older sister, Miranda, has been missing for ten years and assumed by practically everyone except her family to be a murder victim. Now, in the present, circumstances put Ella on the investigative search for Miranda’s whereabouts, dead or alive, and if the former, for her killer.

The investigation packs in all the elements that make both Ella and readers suck in their breath in fear and horror. There are false leads, red herrings, uncovered secrets, multiple suspects, loads of dread and all the other elements that, creepily, make the book work so successfully.

Parting Shot

By Linwood BarclayDoubleday, 464 pages, $24

For the setting of his new book, Linwood Barclay returns to Promise Falls, the hard luck capital of the USA. In recent books, the town in Upper New York state has suffered the poisoning of its water system, the collapse of a huge outdoor movie screen, and many violent deaths.

Nothing so cosmic occurs in the new book, but there’s enough murder to go around, all of the dead people falling victim to local citizens who are at best eccentric and at worst psychopathic nutbars. The victims are no angels either. One of them, a child molester, suffers a baroque form of torture that deprives him of his nose and testicles.

There’s enough room in the book for two favourite characters from past Promise Falls episodes to let them do their sleuthing. The two are Cal Weaver, the PI, and Barry Duckworth, the police detective, who put in clever and resourceful performances in the familiar style of a page-turner Barclay book.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com